Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City said the botched execution on April 29 of an Oklahoma inmate “highlights the brutality of the death penalty” and should bring the nation to “consider whether we should adopt a moratorium on the death penalty or even abolish it altogether.” The planned execution of Clayton Lockett, a convicted killer, in McAlester, Okla., using a new three-drug lethal injection protocol, failed, leaving Lockett showing signs of pain and causing prison officials to halt the procedure. Lockett later died of a heart attack. The state attorney general’s office agreed to a six-month stay of execution for Charles Warner, an inmate scheduled to be executed two hours after Lockett. Gov. Mary Fallin also ordered the state’s department of corrections to conduct a “full review of Oklahoma’s execution procedures to determine what happened and why” during the execution. Archbishop Coakley, in a statement on April 30, said, “How we treat criminals says a lot about us as a society.” The culture of death, he added, “threatens to completely erode our sense of the innate dignity of the human person.”
Oklahoma Bishop: Death Penalty ‘Brutal’
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This article also appeared in print, under the headline "Oklahoma Bishop: Death Penalty ‘Brutal’," in the May 26-June 2, 2014 issue.
I was not choosen by the Lord to juge anybody ...
If the Pope is ever assigned jury duty, that is exactly what he will have to do.
This jury was assigned to judge and proclaim an appropriate sentence. To do otherwise would have been a failure of their duty.
When people cry about the death penalty, they seem to be ignoring what happened to the victims to get the accused a guilty verdict with a sentence of death.